Blake Lively Claims Justin Baldoni Is Using ‘Abuser Playbook’ Tactics

The actress and her “It Ends With Us” co-star have been at each other’s necks after the actress filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment and fostering a toxic work environment.

Justin Baldoni denied the claims and recently filed a counter lawsuit where he alleged she attempted to hijack production from him and used her connections with Reynolds and Taylor Swift to pressure him.

Lively has slammed Baldoni for allegedly employing manipulative tactics in his recently filed $400 million lawsuit against her and her husband, Reynolds.

Responding to Baldoni’s lawsuit, in which he claimed, amongst others, that the Hollywood power couple fabricated schemes to kill his career, Lively’s attorney released a statement accusing Baldoni of using the “abuser playbook” in his new filing.

“This latest lawsuit from Justin Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios, and its associates is another chapter in the abuser playbook,” Lively’s attorneys stated, per the Daily Mail.

They added, “This is an age-old story: A woman speaks up with concrete evidence of sexual harassment and retaliation, and the abuser attempts to turn the tables on the victim. This is what experts call DARVO. Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim Offender.”

Elsewhere in their statement, the “Gossip Girl” star’s attorney claimed that Baldoni’s lawsuit is “retaliation” for her earlier filed suit where she accused him of sexual harassment and fostering a toxic workplace environment on the set of “It Ends With Us.”

The statement alleged Baldoni’s production company Wayfarer Studios “opted to use the resources of its billionaire co-founder to issue media statements, launch meritless lawsuits, and threaten litigation to overwhelm the public’s ability to understand that what they are doing is retaliation against sexual harassment allegations.”

Lively’s attorneys continued, “They are trying to shift the narrative to Ms. Lively by falsely claiming that she seized creative control and alienated the cast from Mr. Baldoni. The evidence will show that the cast and others had their own negative experiences with Mr. Baldoni and Wayfarer.”

The actress’s lawyers pointed out in their statement that production company Sony “asked Ms. Lively to oversee” its share of the film, which they then “selected for distribution and was a resounding success.”

They continued, “Their response to sexual harassment allegations: she wanted it, it’s her fault. Their justification for why this happened to her: look what she was wearing.”

The statement concluded, “In short, while the victim focuses on the abuse, the abuser focuses on the victim. The strategy of attacking the woman is desperate, it does not refute the evidence in Ms. Lively’s complaint, and it will fail.”

Baldoni filed a lawsuit against Lively on Thursday, accusing her of attempting to take away his stake in the adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel and using her connections with Reynolds and Taylor Swift to pressure him into accepting one of her rewrites for the film.

According to the Daily Mail, he accused her of contending with production despite allegedly not reading the book until filming had long started, yet she wanted to change many parts of the scripts.

In his filing, he stated that when the movie entered the pre-production phase, Lively allegedly asked to “take a pass” on the film’s rooftop scene, in which her character, Lily Bloom, meets his character, Ryle Kincaid, for the first time.

Baldoni said that he was “reluctant” to let her “rewrite this key scene” but “agreed to take a look at what she put together,” only to find out that she had “dramatically” changed the script from its original form.

When he put up an “exceedingly mild resistance,” Lively allegedly “went silent for multiple days” and later said in an alleged text message that his reaction to her rewrite “didn’t feel great for me” — or to Reynolds and a person who Baldoni characterizes as “another megacelebrity friend,” later identified as Taylor Swift.

Baldoni also noted that in Lively’s alleged hijack attempt, she went as far as to relegate him and his family to the basement after they arrived on the red carpet of the movie premiere because she “demanded he not attend.”

The lawsuit read, “Security personnel, acting as though there was a risk of ‘escape,’ escorted Baldoni’s group to the basement of the building.”

“There, they were confined to a makeshift holding area surrounded by concession stand stock, with only foldout tables and chairs arranged in a square,” the document continued.

Elsewhere in the filing, he claims that Lively also poked fun at his body and suggested he got a nose job even as she “continued to break character” and “speak as herself rather than as character Lily Bloom, which was extremely confusing” for him.